Chamoiseau, Patrick. School Days. University of Nebraska Press. Paperback. 3/1/1997. One of the liveliest and most creative voices in French literature today is that of Patrick Chamoiseau. Born in 1953 in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where he still lives, he has published several autobiographical narratives (Antan d’enfance, Chemin-d’école) in addition to his novels: Chronique des sept misères, Solibo magnifique, and Texaco, which won France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt in 1992. He collaborated with Raphael Confiant and Jean Bernabé on the critical essay Eloge de La créolité and is the coauthor, with Confiant, of Lettres créoles: Tracées antillaises et continentales de La littérature, 1635-1975. His other essays include Martinique and Guyane, Traces-me-moires du bagne. Creole Folktales (Au temps de l’an tan) was the first of his works to be translated into English. Chamoiseau has explored the traditional themes of Caribbean fiction - slavery, colonialism, the development of class and caste distinctions, the collapse of the plantation economy-with an imaginative brio both daring and magisterial. In texts of striking poetic density, he evokes the terrifying destitution at the heart of this lush, tropical world: the loss of ancestral ties to an Africa itself now long gone; the decline of village life and a growing estrangement from the land; the suppression and devaluation of Creole, the everyday language of slavery, in favor of French, the language of the white colonial plantocracy. In the French Antilles, the language, literature, and culture of France were transmitted to all sectors of society through a strictly metropolitan education, but this increased identification with France came at the cost of further alienation from indigenous folk values. The 1930s, however, saw the birth of the French ‘black pride’ literary movement of Negritude, one of whose leaders was the great Martinican poet and politician Aimé Césaire. The postwar decades have been characterized by a search for an original, authentic Caribbean culture, a movement that has led in the French West Indies to a revaluation of Creolite. As a writer, Chamoiseau has found resonant themes in the tension between the French and Creole cultures and in the complexities of class, race, and language this tension reveals. The writer’s relationship with the written word-indeed, with the very ability to write-is of paramount interest to Chamoiseau, who embodies the central paradox of Martinican literature: writing necessarily represents a profound break with the essential orality of Creole language and culture, like Edouard Glissant, the influential literary theoretician of Antillanité, Chamoiseau proclaims the need to respect the continuity between the Creole storyteller and the writer as ‘word maker,’ He writes in a French that is both highly polished and extravagantly unconventional: antic, lyrical, sarcastic, at times oneiric, even opaque, and above all, vocal. The African griot has been called the repository of the cultural memory of a people. The fabulous narrator of School Days recalls to life the cultural memory of a writer-to-be, in the diminutive person of a little black boy of courage and cunning who goes off to school one day with a blithe heart, only to find that he has ventured into a foreign country from which he can never return. When he looks around him, he realizes that in the eyes of his teachers his own world barely exists, Caught betwixt and between, stunned by this otherness that has been imposed on him (and on all colonial children everywhere), he nevertheless manages to find his voice, discovering-in both Creole tongue and French text-the awesome healing and subversive powers of language. ABOUT THE TRANSLATION: Chamoiseau does not believe in glossaries, preferring that his readers open themselves to the ‘subterranean magic’ of strange words, but a short glossary has been appended to this translation to explain a few basic (or irresistibly choice) terms, The author’s Creole expressions have been retained, sometimes with English translations provided in footnotes. 146 pages. keywords: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) social justice, arab literature, religion. 9780803263765